Horse 3343 - The Fallout Of Fallout

 There is currently a TV series on Amazon Prime called 'Fallout'; which is set inside the general universe of the Fallout series of games by Bethesda. 

From what I have seen of the trailers and propaganda, it retains the 1950s Atomicpunk vibe of the games but moves the soundtrack beyond the 1950s to include the 1960s as well. In the light of this, I was asked to write a piece on the likelihood of surviving an all out nuclear war. 

As yet, the only two nuclear bombs ever dropped in warfare were so horrific to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that world leaders were quite rightly very very scared and loathe to use them again. Given that we will never really know how close we got to nuclear war, thankfully we never really tested this. Perhaps the closest that the world ever got, was either during the Cuban Missile Crisis at the end of 1962, or the Able Archer exercises in 1983. I think that what is really curious about both of those cases is that it was the Russian Submarine Captain who was in charge of a fully-armed and operational nuclear platform and the East German Ministry of Defence who showed restraint and did not push the button. This means that any and all moral argument of the righteousness of the West, is functionally bunk.

As for the technical questions about whether or not people would survive a nuclear war, then the answer to that as with most cases of military aggression directed at civilian populations, is mostly 'no'. Despite what the eejits in the United States might tell you, there are no defensive uses of a gun. All projectile weapons only telos is to kill people. Failure to kill people, is a failure of the weapon to fulfil its intended function. So it is with nuclear weapons. They are designed to kill people, very efficiently. In many instances within the blast zones of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the efficiency was so exact, that they didn't merely kill people but utterly vaporized them and the only evidence that they were ever there were shadows left behind in the heat. But in case you are interested, here are some technical details of the human body which are useful.

Humans are electromechanical devices, with meat wrapped around a calcium carbonate structure; which are then driven by a salty thought muscle and however the human soul is attached therein. This means that as devices go, humans are actually pretty fragile things. Humans possess the ability to do damage to each other, and not just bruising, by use of simple machines which improve the mechanical advantage of what little power humans can actually generate. If you give a human a club, or a sword, they can pierce and slice flesh and break bones.

You average human contains a calcium carbonate structure, which is encased in meat. Those bones which are mineral in nature, are very good in dealing with compression forces but not particularly brilliant with tension forces. If a point force is directed at a human bone encased in meat, then the speed at which it will nominally break is just 13km/h. This explains why in car parks, traffic designers want you to crawl around at 10km/h. For children, the impact speed for a point force is marginally higher but no more than about 20%. This explains why broken bones can occur on the sporting field, or why people can break their bones after falling over from relatively small heights. The fun thing about a nuclear blast though, is that it can travel at many hundreds of kilometres per hour. Admittedly a blast will cover far more than just a point but people tend to live in environments where there are buildings and in a nuclear blast there will be many random parts and pieces and objects which are thrown by the nuclear blast at people. Broken bones are therefore, the first consequence of a nuclear weapon.

That meat is also encased in a layer of skin. Although that skin is stretchy and flexible, it too has limits. Everything living thing is mostly made of just four chemical elements; these being Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen and Oxygen. The fun thing about those four elements is that when you apply enough heat to then, then chemistry happens. When we apply enough heat to other living things (which we have made dead), then that chemistry which happens is sometimes delicious. The problem is that when you do delicious chemistry to living things which we have not made dead, then the result is unpleasant. If we apply enough heat to living things which we have not made dead, then we can make them dead. Human skin tends to burn at about 70°C. Human flesh tends to cook at about 150°C. Burning skin and cooked flesh are suboptimal when it comes to a human remaining alive. 

Human skin in addition to being stretchy and flexible, reaches a point when that stretch and flexibility reaches its material limit. Humans can find this out pretty easily by accidentally cutting themselves with knives or paper (or deliberately). It is possible to lacerate skin with any object that moves faster than about 20km/h. 

All of these things happen simultaneously in a nuclear detonation. If a 1 Megaton weapon detonates less than a 1000 metres above the ground, then everything within about 8 kilometres will be instantly vapourised. Beyond that, skin will burn, the fats in people will also burn, flesh will cook; and that's before you start adding effects such as every single combustible object also burning, metals melting, and the shock wave throwing glass, metal, wood, stone,. whatever, at people at hundreds of kilometers an hour.

I have no doubt that if there was a full-on nuclear war, then cities would be targeted and many thousands of nuclear devices would be dropped simultaneously. For big population centres like New York, Tokyo, London, Beijing, et cetera, you could probably expect tens of millions of people to be vapourised in less than a minute. Beyond that, the fallout and clouds which would likely envelop the earth, would likely be enough to make practically every plant on earth fail, and if anyone did actually survive, then they would likely either eventually starve to death or suffer the ongoing effects of radiation which would continue well beyond the lifetimes of anyone alive at the time. A full-on nuclear war is a civilisation termination event and possibly an omnicidal extinction event.

I have not seen Fallout on Amazon Prime but we can be reasonably safe in assuming that this is purely a work of not even speculative fiction. The more likely scenario given  the events in the first episode is that everyone and everything would be dead; there would be no survivors in any of the blast zones and everyone else would have long since starved to death. 

For the protagonist of The Ghoul, we can assume that as he survived the blast, he was not in the immediate zone of vapourisation. However, he would have likely died from extensive third-degree burns and be blinded as his eyeballs would have burned his retinas due to the focussing action of his corneas (that is of course if his eyeballs themselves didn't simulaneously explode and/or haemorrage.

As for the protagonist of Lucy MacLean, we can assume that as she lived in a Vault, that she would have survived. That is except for one problem; her 7x great-grandparents would not have survived. Lucy therefore would not exist.

The lore is such that these Vaults are sufficiently far enough underground, that layers of earth would be enough to protect them. Indeed, if there was a full-on nuclear war, then in most cities you would be best advised to seek shelter in the deep level subway and underground railway stations. You can basically assume that the trains will never run again and that the power stations which are used to power the trains will never work again; so the risk of electrocution from overhead power lines and/or third rail would be minimal. Then again, the intense heat and the fact that there would be so much oxygen demanded by everything being on fire would mean that if you actually were in a central train station, then you would be suffocated as well as roasted.

I see no possible way that given the scenario of the general universe of the Fallout series, that there would be anyone alive to tell the tale; anywhere on the face of the earth. This makes for a fun video game and a fun television series but the real world implications are so horrific and so terrible as to render it actually impossible.  

Horse 3342 - Things Can Only Get Better After 5th July (They Can Not Get Worse)

On the 4th of July 1776, the thirteen American colonies in congress decided to declare their independence from Britain. Lord North's Tory Government would have been livid if it had been informed (but it wasn't). On the 4th of July 2024, the six hundred and forty-nine constituencies (not the Speaker), will go to the polls and probably declare their independence from another Tory Government. 

Sit back and watch as the right-wing establishment media goes into almost openly fascist overdrive as it tries to paint Keir Starmer as a communist, a soviet, an anarchist, a globalist, a European, and as actually being the entire of Hamas. The first casualty of war is truth and in a propaganda war, the killing of truth is in fact the very first action. Keir Starmer might very well be all sorts of things including a giant berk and a blithering eejit and under most circumstances that might be enough to swing the tide (it was enough to tell simple lies about Jeremy Corbyn being an anti-Semite five years ago) but when you have actual rivers full of feces, merely spraying the stuff is not enough any more.

Herein lies the problem for the right-wing media, in the six weeks of this 2024 General Election campaign, not even the usual propaganda war of lies will be enough to return the tories to government when the truth is just so very very very terrible. In the now 14 years of tory governments, they have smashed the universities, severed any kind of sensible ties and relations with the EU, successfully defunded and degraded the NHS, somehow made Britain's railways and roads worse, and done so little maintenance of things like water and sewerage that in many parts of Britain the water coming out of the taps is actually worse than before the Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1851.

In short, this Tory Government which is basically led by caretaker Prime Minister Rishi Sunak before he escapes to his fortune which is even more massive than that of the Royal Family (probably to Cote d'Azure), will be ejected faster than you can say Tommy Robinson (is not helping).

As I am something of a data nerd, I ran the latest YouGov polls through my uniform swing calculator. As at time of writing (23rd May), I end up with the following results:

477 - Labour

62 - Conservative

56 - SNP

31 - All Others

24 - (Northern Ireland)

326 of 650 seats are needed in the House of Commons to form government. This particular General Election will not be a case of whether or not Labour can form government or whether they can get to 400 seats but if the tories are so far on the nose that Labour actually makes it to 500 seats. Any pieces talking of a hung parliament, like I saw in both The Telegraph and The Times, are the equivalent of rearranging dining chairs in the Steerage Dining Hall on the Titanic. Forget deck chairs on the outside decks. The ship is sinking. The ship is sinking. There's a leak in the boiler room; the poor, the lame, the blind. Who are the ones we left in charge? Killers, thieves, and lawyers.

This General Election campaign, even before it has begun, does not feel like it will be accompanied with the same kind of optimism as the 1997 Election did. Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" was substanceless but at least it came with jelly and ice cream. In 1997 there was at least some kind of hope that the tory cake could be unbaked. A generation later, there is no hope for that. Yes, there will be dancing in the streets of Total Network Solutions that night but on 5th July 2024, there will remain the awful truth that not only will the cake have to be unbaked but it will have to be chiselled as it was baked with cement and not flour.

The weird thing is that the date for the election, was leaked before it had been announced at Number 10. Procedurally in a Westminster Parliament, the head of Government visits the executive for the Crown, which in this case is the Prime Minister visiting the King. The Crown then issues a writ for dissolution and the announcement of the election is gazetted. This time around though, everyone found out that the election is going to happen in 4th July because former Prime Minister Liz Truss released a pamphlet canvassing for support for the election on July 4th. Now the only way that she could have known about that is if the 1922 Committee had already made its decision and instructed the Prime Minister to visit the King. However, the fact that Liz Truss produced this pamphlet before the writs had been issued, very much indicates that the Conservative Party is currently in some kind of pre-election breakdown if the whips can't control their MPs. This might be the tip of the iceberg.

This then is the state of play. Over the next six weeks Rishi Sunak will bravely be the face of an election campaign which he knows is bound to lose. Whether or not he retains his own seat remains to be seen but if in the event that he does, I do not see him remaining in the new parliament any longer than about a fortnight. More than likely he'd announce his resignation as an MP and take up the ceremonial position as Sheriff for the Chiltern Hundreds before disappearing to his lovely life of luxury living off of the interest of the interest of the interest. Meanwhile Keir Starmer will spend six weeks ignoring bad faith questioning from the right-wing trashmedia and trying not to say anything spicier than milquetoast. He has already perfected the art of not having a personality, which I suspect wasn't too difficult to him. 

Provided Keir Starmer doesn't say anything barbaric and provided that some major calamitous war doesn't break out (such as a nuclear bomb going off in Tel Aviv), then Labour will not so much win the 2024 General Election as the tories have spent all of the 20s trying to lose it. 

Horse 3341 - Kakosynaisthima - Element VII - Fear

 Fear is the easiest thing in this list of elements of Kakosynaisthima to define, by virtue of it being the easiest to excite. Put simply, Fear is the emotional response to the fact that another entity has the power to cause harm, damage, or to kill you. In principle that is a perfectly rational thing to have because of course it is reasonable and rational to have a fear of the things that can kill you. Any examination what what people have a fear of will bear this out. A fear of heights, a fear of the water, a fear of certain beasts, a fear of god, a fear of other people, a fear of things in the environment, a fear of diseases - all of these things due to their power to do work, can and will kill you if the circumstances are right.

Herein lies the dual nature of fear and why it is both useful and can be utterly useless. Fear as the thing that heightens the senses, triggers the flee or fight response. That famous Shakespearean instruction "Exit, pursued by a bear" from The Winter's Tale sounds like a jolly good idea because the bear can and will kill you. However, Fear as the mind killer, fear the anesthetic of bravery, fear the turgid morass which is able to keep the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos stuck and still, is both a self-preservation device and a self-defeat device. While on one hand it is fit and proper to be afraid of the things which can cause harm to you or kill you, on the other to be stuck in a place of crippling inaction is awful. 

Personally, I can not swim and this has led to the fact that I have a probably unreasonably overactive fear of the water. This is arguably a good thing as it means that I do not really have much of a desire to go to the beach and swim in the ocean, nor to swimming pools and swim in them either. Fear in this case has acted as a self-preservation device and so far, I have not drowned. It could be argued that because I also miss out on the fun of going swimming that this is a but thing but in all honesty, I don't really care. Of course also speaking as someone who has been permanently injured as a result of being hit by a car, you would think that this would result in a fear of the road and yet it has not. Perhaps I am more careful than I was but given the fact that I was crossing the street at a pedestrian crossing and still got hit anyway, perhaps my fear of the street should be magnified more than it is; maybe it has not been magnified more than it is because my underlying set of assumptions are that the street is a rules based system which is reasonably predictable. 

As a self-preservation device, fear also has a strange way of making people do irrational and/or unethical things. As deeply selfish beings, humans often act in ways that are consequentially harmful to other people. If by way of seeking out the "yummy, yummy, yummy" they have found advantage by resorting to needing to lie, or cheat, or steal, and there is the possibility of someone else exposing the lying, cheating, or stealing, then fear often drives people to cover their tracks; which in turn may warrant more lying, cheating, or stealing.

Also as a self-preservation device, fear also has a strange way of making people do irrational things in order to escape the horridness perpetrated by other people. The elements of Kakosynaisthima can cause other to spring forward, but the fear of what others may do is a very strong cause of loneliness. Fear as self-preservation device demands that someone withdraw from the thing causing "not yummy" and when that withdrawal is to pull away from other people, then the population in the immediate is one. This is fear causing someone to withdraw and be alone, with the product of loneliness. Left unchecked, fear blossoms into anxiety; which is not only real but awful.

As with Pain, Fear is kind of like being equipped with a warning system but with all of the generality of an engine check light. In people are fearful, then they generally have the faculties to know what the cause of their fear is but not necessarily the ability to know what to do about it. In dealing with matters in the environment, people evacuating or getting out of the situation is usually the most sensible course of action. It stands to reason that if you are standing in a field with an angry bull, that you should probably run away and get out of the field. If on the other hand, the thing cause someone to be fearful is another person, then fear as a warning system might very well be utterly useless in informing someone what to do. 

When people find themselves being fearful of other people, the situation is one in which they are generally unable to escape from very easily. Someone who has to deal with a bully in school or a workplace, can not very well leave their school or workplace very easily. Of course in the most intimate of situations where you have someone who is fearful of someone else inside a family unit, either a parent or a spouse, then the suggestion by well-meaning people who can only observe from the outside to tell people to get out, while made with the best of intentions, could very well be utterly useless. When one is tied that closely to the cause of fear (where someone not only has the power to cause harm, damage, or to kill you, but actively threatens to do so), then leaving may in fact crystallise that fear and the cause becomes manifest. When a spouse fears that their partner might kill them, believe them. The fear is real and the possibility is close. It is not that simple to just leave. Fear which is the result of being treated badly to the point of harm and injury, especially at the hands of someone whom they should not have to fear at all, is awful and a terrible thing to have to go through.

If fear drives someone to make decisions which are unthinking and unfeeling, then the result is often damage to themselves and other people. Fear as the mind killer in control of the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos, makes people act irrationally and yet because they think that they are the heroes of their own universe, a mind driven by fear is even less convinced that it can do wrong. Fear as the mind killer in control of a now unthinking beast, wants people to build more walls to keep their personal fortress intact. Fear as the mind killer in control of a now unthinking beast, wants people to fire as many weapons in as many directions as they possibly can in all directions because in keeping everyone off at a distance, fear wants make sure that the person is not hurt.

Fear which drives a now irrational mind to blame other people for their misfortune unduly, while at the same time writing a safety myth that the person is the hero of their own universe, invariably leads to layers of support being made hotter and hotter before being blown off like a supernova. Yes, the person at the centre might very well gain a sense that they are right and just and good in their own eyes, but it means that support networks which have been blown away no longer operate; leaving the person in possible a worse state than they were before. Fear successfully builds more walls in the fortress of people's minds but at what cost? This would suggest that fear as a manufactured response to the things which you think might harm or damage you, might very well be a response without due cause. In this case fear acts as a warning system where the information is asymmetric to the correct response.

If you have a system with a general warning lamp letting you know that something, as yet unknown, is wrong, then it is common sense to take inventory and find out what has gone wrong. I of course use the term "common sense" advisedly as common sense turns out to be not so common when fear drives people to do things. As the telos of fear is to serve the purpose of acting as a warning, then defence against the things which cause fear, is either to face those things or to get out.

There is a reasonably large dearth of information to suggest that exposure to the things that cause fear, can help to quash or ameliorate those fears. There is also a degree to which the consequence of facing those fears, changes the perspective of one who is fearful, to the point where they very quickly develop the confidence to do the thing or to face the thing immediately. I have heard it said that courage is standing in the face of fear, and then doing it anyway. Of course there is also the distinct possibility that facing the cause of one's fears might only serve to perpetuate the problem. 

A fear of public speaking for instance, is mostly an imagined response to the prospect of looking silly in front of a lot of people. However, most people find that with a bit a of practice in front of the people. the actual experience does not match up with the supposed cause of their imagined fears. Similar experiences exist for other minor fears such as a fear of flying, or dogs, or the dark, or spiders, et cetera, where the actual harm is small. Exposure therapy for fears caused by bigger and more important fears, may not be so simple. Put bluntly, if a thing causes you to be fearful, then you can eliminate the fear by proving that the thing is not actually a just cause for the response, or by gradually desensitising yourself to the thing. Or you can get out.

Fear as the easiest thing in this list of elements of Kakosynaisthima to define, is also ridiculously obvious in its telos and can and does serve a useful purpose. If the general warning lamp of fear is blinking, then common sense also suggest that it might be an idea to get out. It stands to reason that if something or someone is causing distress or harm, then it makes sense to get as far away from them as possible. Life however is far more complex than so-called "common sense" might concede that it is. Sometimes people are in a situation where getting out is not as easy as other people telling them to do so make out that it is, because in such cases the the general warning lamp of fear is blinking for a very good reason. Remember, fear is the emotional response that an entity has the power to cause harm, damage, or to kill you. Particularly in situations which involve domestic violence, simply telling someone to get out when the other person is presumed to have the power to cause harm and damage, and might actually become sufficiently angry enough to act, then fear is working perfectly because it is rational to have a fear of the things that can kill you.

Horse 3340 - The Right Hates Education Because The Kids Might Learn Enough To Talk Back

When I was standing in line at the bank on Monday to deposit some cheques, Sky News Australia was on the telly and Rowan Dean who is the Editor in Chief of The Spectator magazine in Australia, was having something of a preaching session about why the universities in Australia which are currently the site of considerable protest against the war in Gaza, should not only be defunded as public institutions but that there should be some new institution for teaching conservative values to students. He appeared to be calling for a specifically conservative business school, in the same way that something like Australian Catholic University might teach Catholic values to its students.

I can understand why Mr Dean should object to students having any kind of voice at all. As the Editor in Chief of The Spectator magazine in Australia, he is effectively the Australian agent for the very British tory establishment. When you consider that previous Editors in Chief of The Spectator magazine in Britain have included Nigel Lawson and Boris Johnson, who were then installed in the very heart of government at Westminster at Number 11 and Number 10, then any kind of voice against what The Spectator must be silenced. "Conservative values" has displayed by The Spectator magazine included open praise for the angry mustachioed German man from 1935-1938 until things went a even bit to unpleasant for The Spectator magazine.

Universities in particular have often been a thorn in the side of people in power. Not only do universities represent a kind of third place, but the age of the students is such that they still have the vigour and anger to be able to make coordinated protests. Also, as university is a period in one's life before someone enters full-time work in a lot of cases, university students are doubly blessed with not just vigour and anger but that most precious of commodities, time. Coincidentally, the other period in people's lives when they have a lot of time is in retirement; which is what talk-back radio and Sky News Australia have built their preaching model on.

Recently, one of the dog-whistle clarion cries which appears to be a coordinated effort across the Anglosphere by the Murdoch press, is the yelling that there is too much immigration. Of course rabid racist xenophobia is nothing new, but this latest effort is nothing more than a cover to convince middle and lower class people that the reason why rents are going up is because of the immigrants and not because of a deliberate degradation of public housing and a concerted chronic lack of investment in public housing. They will of course mention nothing of the fact that the propertied rentier class is making money hand over fist but when this is pointed out, blame is then put back on 'the market' instead of the housing policy in the first place.

At the same time, we have Universities selling education at massively inflated costs to foreign students; also because of a degradation of education and a concerted chronic lack of investment in the labour stock of the nation. This is of course deliberate. The people who own and/or control capital, want to keep their little cabals of ownership and control to themselves; so any kind of ladder upwards, such as a decent wage, home ownership, tertiary education, must be removed or destroyed.

If the twenty-first century has told us anything, it is that everything that the Lost, Greatest and Silent Generations fought for, and paid for with the lives of more than 100 million souls, can very easily be stolen away and has been done so by the Baby Boomers and the top half of Generation X, who inherited everything, were given the highest real wages in the history of the world, and are now parasitically stealing the work of Generations X, Y, and Z, in the continued maintenance of the lifestyle they didn't have to work for.

All of this means to say that the horrors of the twentieth century, which produced a very brief period of economic paradise for a wider range of people, also known as Les Trente Gloriueses from 1945-1975, were an anomaly. It was only because so much physical capital was destroyed that that happened. What the late period of the twentieth century and the opening three decades of the twenty-first century should remind us of, is that the people who own and/or control capital, want to keep their little cabals of ownership and control to themselves, and that what is going on is nothing more than a reassertion of that condition. This was, is, and always will be, the central project of Empire.

The project of Empire, which has always been the same project but rebranded occasionally, is the exercise of raw naked power for the purpose of the exercise of raw naked power. It matters not whether it was the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Olmecs, the Mongols, the British, the French, the Germans, or the Americans, the goal of every empire has always been identical.

There are in fact two massive problems with the project of Empire. The first is the fact that on the way to exercising of raw naked power, factions within the Empire will compete to eventually become the top of the stack. Sometimes this resolves itself via factions, or parties, or families, or corporations. Capitalism is not anything particularly interesting, other than a slightly different collective ownership program; which is designed to maintain raw naked power in those few select hands. There were some interesting experiments by means of communist revolutions but they actually end up in mostly the same place; which is factions competing to eventually become the top of the stack.

So when I hear Rowan Dean on Sky News Australia, banging on about how there needs to be new institutions for teaching the leaders of tomorrow, which aren't infected by wokism or leftism, I believe that his intentions are genuine. It isn't very often that you get a peek behind the curtain and see raw naked power actually parading around in no clothes, but here we are. 

This might sound ridiculous now but once upon a time, universities were centres for learning. It was at universities that people learnt how to think, learnt history, learnt about the arts, and learnt the useful sciences. Somewhere between about 1870 and 1914, when it was decided that the way that you controlled empire, and this included both the British Empire and emerging American Empire, that the corporation and not the estate would be the basis of rebuilding the world into the next phase of the project of Empire. Probably the last war to be played out, with the training from the playing fields of Harrow and Eton, was the First World War. By the Second World War, economics had built itself into the excuse generation factory for capitalists and mercantilists and after the war, the great chasm of capitalism and communism was a useful narrative; when in actual fact the mechanism for owning and/or control capital looked practically identical on either side of the Iron Curtain.

I think that it is reasonable to believe that the factions who want to exercise raw naked power purely for its own sake, would want to eject universities from public funding and from the pipeline of producing people who might be capable of leading nations. As it is, as far as the people who own and/or control capital are concerned, the reason that universities currently exist is as a certificate giving and almost semi-vetting process to make sure that the right people get into positions of power and excluding the people that don't. The idea of the university as learning centre is utterly pointless to the people who own and/or control capital because the Arts are only of use if they can sell tickets, the Humanities serve no purpose whatsoever, and the useful Sciences are only useful as far as they are able to produce technicians who can operate the machines of production. 

The war in Gaza is a problem for media outlets like Sky News Australia and The Spectator magazine because just like in times past, although they can paint the two sides as goodies and baddies to appease their funding donors, we have long reached the point where the moral dimension and the amount of blood spilled is horrendous. In calling for a new institution for teaching conservative values to students, what Mr Dean actually wants is for the students who currently exist to shut up and put up and get out of the way of business' ongoing project of Empire. The way that you can silence an opposing voice is to dismantle it; which is what Mr Dean is calling for.

Horse 3339 - The 2024 Presidential Debate (in the other timeline)

After securing the Republican Party nomination early and thus making Super Tuesday irrelevant, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and President Joe Biden will meet for the second time in a series of televised debates before the 2024 Presidential Election. Speaker Ryan hopes kickstart lagging American manufacturing with his "Stepping Forward" program; which involves government incentive payments for businesses to take on apprentices and trainees. President Biden is hoping to counter "Stepping Forward" with his own headline set of policies which include the National Health Agency; which will become the new universal payer for healthcare services, funded by a 1.5% levy on incomes.

Or rather... That should have been the time line.

I don't know where in 2014 or 2015 the switch was flipped but the last decade or so has definitely been the outworking of a series of bugs in the programming. If we are living in a computer simulation, or inside the matrix, or are all just figments of the imagination of someone in a drug-induced fever coma dream, then it was about a decade ago when we switched from a tragic yet semi-logical timeline to a really really stupid one.

Had everything stayed on the tragic yet semi-logical timeline, then Hilary Clinton would have been President from 2017-2021; and then still been so unpopular within the Democrat Party that she would have still been replaced by Joe Biden in the 2020 Election, and the above photo for the 2024 Election would have happened. There is no way no how that we would have ever gotten the good timeline in which Bernie Sanders became President and embarked upon an actual shift of American politics to the left and a new wave of Teddy Roosevelt style of reforms. 

No. 

Instead we got the stupid timeline; which has involved a collapse of any kind of sensible leadership in rightist parties across the Anglosphere (which kicked off with the Year Of The Howling Moron), the rise of actual far-rightist parties across Europe, and the emboldenment of functional fascists such as Putin and Netanyahu; who have demonstrated as much by actively pursuing war while the world kind of begrudgingly approves. 

Meanwhile, as the colour of politics got more stupid, the pandemic was an excuse to accelerate the use of market power by capital, to the point where the breaking points of society are starting to be exposed. Politically, the actual economic left has been seen off by the economic right; so that only leaves the field of play for the Libertarian South to fight the Authoritarian North. Since they both live on the economic right (because let's be perfectly honest, so much of all of the political -isms of the twenty-first century have all been rightist), then all we get is a pointless culture war where the names of things are yelled at each other. Almost the entire of the battleground of the culture war, is little more than token exchange. Nobody seems to actually care about solving the big problems of society; which have been the result of 40 years of active policies.

As we look forward to the actual series of televised debates before the 2024 Presidential Election, all I can do is find myself asking the question 'why?' and 'what?'. Why are they happened and what is the actual point. One candidate has repeatedly proven that he does not and will not construct any argument whatsoever and the other one is really just a caretaker until this whole thing blows over. At this point in time, nobody will be actually listening to the substance of what they will say because there is no real substance to be found. This means that the 2024 Presidential Election will purely be lost and won on the basis of which set of vibes happens to be vibrating louder in the general token exchange of the culture war.

It isn't difficult to see how we arrived at this point. Basically what happened at the end of the 1970s was that a series of shocks in the price of oil, made business realise that they actually had more power than they thought they did. If we can assume that the Trent Gloriseus was an anomaly, then capital decided to reassert itself with the election cycles from 1976 onwards. In Australia which was used as a test case, a Prime Minister was fired; then in the UK and the US, capital worked out that it could poison people's opinions forever by abandoning truth and purely shifting to a perpetual propaganda tone. Thatcher and Reagan who both essentially created a minor echo boom by selling off everything, did their job and both Alzheimered their way into the sunset; completely free of consequence. Capital won the economic war firstly in the west and then on the dismal side of the Iron Curtain, because as it turns out, we can't actually supply all the wants of capital if they already own everything. What's happening now in the west, is the same process as capital is running out of things to conquer.

If we look back on the tragic yet semi-logical timeline, then at this point in time we would have had politicians with actual substance. Malcolm Turnbull would have remained as Prime Minister until 2022 and Penny Wong would be Prime Minister from the Senate now. Britain would have voted for a Corbyn Labor Government in 2019; which would have actually rebuilt the NHS and there wouldn't be this omnishambles which exists now. Ryan would have remained as Speaker of the House and because the Republican Party wouldn't have pivoted to this insane culture war point it would actually putting forward genuine policies.

Paul Ryan as the most sensible and conciliatory politician of the generation, would have actually made deals and bargains through congressional process to do that really bizarre concept now of... wait for it... here's the punchline... getting stuff done.

Instead, on this timeline, the stupid timeline, where the only things that politicians can argue about are flags and pronouns and songs and who is offended, instead of the fact that there is genuine knavery with people being killed across the world and people who don't really have any kind of long term security about where they will call home, all the while blaming in on foreigners and brown people and people who look different, then of course nothing actually gets done. Rinse. Repeat. Wallow. Yell. 

Horse 3338 - Kakosynaisthima - Element VI - Frustration

It can probably be said of all the things that we would consider to be lusts, that is things which people unduly love in raw gratification of the self, basically extend from two main telos; those are the elimination of pain and the maximisation of pleasure. It should surprise no-one that once again we stare hard at the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos which wants to make value judgements betweem what is "yummy, yummy, yummy" and what is "not yummy" and then yell longly and loudly when it does not get what it wants. Indeed the fulfillment of what the beast wants to an unlimited capacity, which is the basis of gluttony and greed, is nothing more than the beast going to unreasonable lengths to achieve the fulfilment of those wants

All of that is fine and we can acquiesce to reasonable limits being placed upon us, where the beast is chained and power restrained, but what happens if the things which we want are not unduly selfish and in some cases quite reasonable; yet we still can not have them? What then? People will acquiesce that undue desire in pursuit of raw gratification of the self is bad but by the same token, it is not of itself bad to have needs, desires, preferences, and wants. You are allowed to want things. Some of those things such as a want to be happy, or find fulfillment in work, or to achieve something, or to make the kosmos a better system, or to improve the lives of other people, or to fight for justice, equality, fairness, or even to love and be loved, are arguably the higher and better ends of life and may even hint at what the telos of life actually is. 

The kosmos however, is apathetic and agnostic to our existence. Perhaps one of the most brutal realisations that one can come to, and this especially comes into sharp focus when one is attending a gravesite memorial service, is that the kosmos is perfectly capable of carrying on when someone has departed.  It seems almost cruel that everyone else in the world, goes on exactly as they had before as though the person of whom your are attending the memorial service, matters not a jot. To them, that person does in fact matter not a jot. Likewise, the people attending the memorial service, matter not a jot to the rest of the kosmos. As limited beings who can only see the world from a single perspective, it sometimes seems utterly horrific that you, matter not a jot to the rest of the kosmos. Likewise, it immediately follows that the kosmos will also carry on completely perfectly after we too have departed this mortal coil and been and gone. 

That sense of utter apathy by the kosmos to us, is sometimes an immense source of angst and frustration. Perhaps one of the most obvious consequences of being a very small thing in complex kosmos which is mostly apathetic towards us, is that we have very little control over the kosmos at large. We have some degree of control of the space within the fortress of our minds and if we are granted responsibility and authority over circumstances and other people, we might have control over those too. However, for the vast vast vast bulk of the kosmos, we have very little control of very much. Even the richest trillionaires who control vast amounts of dollarpounds, or general in armies who control large numbers of soldiers and troops, or politicians who can control the shape of the law and the destiny of nations, all still can not control very much. Consequently, the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos knowing that it has very little control over very much, is often frustrated at what it can not do.

As far as the environment is concerned, we can not control whether it is hot or cold outside, we can not control whether it is sunny or cloudy, and we can not control whether it is windy or calm. We can control those things to some degree if we are inside but that still leaves things that we can not control. We can not for the most part control the automatic systems within our own bodies either. We can control a lot of gross and fine motor controls and yes, you can control your breathing and maybe the blinking of your eyeballs, but you can not control your digestion, or the internal movements of your bowel, or  even the beating of your heart to much of a degree.

Yet here we are, as the central character of our lives; being unable to control particularly a lot about them. We have agency and we can make decision about a lot of things but even then, so much of our lives are a total crapshoot. Some people are just lucky to be dealt with sixes and eights, and some poor people roll box-cars and snake eyes in the great dice roll of life. Depending on what your religious views of the kosmos are, this may or may not be the result of election by a supreme being but even if it is or is not, when life hands you horrid circumstances then people very quickly to cursing the skies, cursing god, cursing the kosmos, and trying to yell into the great apathy. For someone who is the main character in the narrative of their own lives, everything that they can not control, everyone that they can not control, everyone circumstance they can not control, can all become immense sources of frustration.

It does not help that one of the problems that we have with living inside of the prison and fortress our own minds is that we can not see into or know the minds of other people. This means that we can not fully understand the minds of other people or even the actions which they do. This also plays in concert with the fact that as we are living inside of the prison and fortress our own minds with only our own perspective, then we are by default the central and main character of our own lives and our own story. In trying to make sense of the kosmos, we construct narratives and stories which make logical sense to us. The problem in doing that is that as we are small beings with incomplete information, the narratives and stories and actions of other people might not make logical sense to us. There is massive amounts of space between what makes logical sense for us and the narratives and stories and actions of other people; which means that other people can appear stupid, obnoxious, and just plain daft to us. Quite often it is not the materiel of what has happened but the seemingly illogical actions of other people which is the source of our frustrations.

I think it was Jean-Paul Sartre who quipped that "Hell is other people". I do not claim that this is necessarily true but what is true is that other people are obviously playing with as much incomplete information as I am. Even then that's generous because deep down we all know that not only are other people stupid, obnoxious, and just plain daft, but they can on occasion be belligerent, cruel, irrational, cranky, mean, revengeful and above all selfish. The reason why we know this to be true is that we know first hand that we are exactly like them. However, it is one thing to find fault with other people but the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos point blank refuses to admit that it is the source of an equal amount of belligerence, cruelty, irrationality and selfishness, even though we know it to be true. What is worse is that when you have eight billions of people who are all selfish, that creates massive feedback loops everywhere. For example, the fact that just five people control more income than half the world's population or that the largest 200 corporations account for more than a quarter of all economic activity, are facts in the abstract which stem from that mass selfishness but when that is narrowed to a very micro view of the world, the effects of that mass selfishness are still noticeable.

Given that the kosmos is apathetic towards us, and that people are irrational, and sometimes mean, revengeful and above all selfish, then what are we to do? Frustration in response to both the kosmos and people not working (including ourselves), would indicate that there is at least some residual hope that the kosmos can be better. If the kosmos can actually not get better, then the two rational responses are despair in the face of it and/or acceptance, because refusal to accept reality seems like a losing game to me. If things can actually get better though, then the first and most obvious reponse to to ask that favourite question of small children - "why?" Sometimes children will ask this because they are genuinely curious about how the kosmos works and sometimes they ask the question out of boredom or because it is fun to get an annoyed rise out of people but that simple question if "why?" as people get older generally gets more desperate as people grow up and realise the sheer horror of being a small thing in a vast kosmos with very little power. Why don't people like me? Why does my boss hate me? Why doesn't that thing work properly? Why is the system broken? Why haven't they done what they said they would? Why is the kosmos so unpleasant? Asking questions about how the kosmos works via the process of science nurtures curiosity but being forces to ask questions about why the kosmos is apatheistic or agnostic or atelostic, is quite another.

Does frustration have any telos or serve any proper purpose? Maybe. Within the 1944 Jean-Paul Sartre play "Huis Clos" (No Exit), three people are trapped in one single dark room. They can not escape the physical space that they are in but worse, they can not the watchful gaze of each other. Is the room actually Hell? We never find out. What we do find out though, is that beyond being trapped by the space and each other's gaze, they are trapped by the judgments of their cellmates. Hence why "Hell is other people". Their response is that after they have got beyond passing judgment each other as objects (for it is objects that I everyone appears to other people), they end up confessing their sins to one another and fall into a bizarre love triangle. Perhaps even scarier of all, they learn to love themselves.

Maybe this is what frustration is actually for. Sure, you can try and hide yourself in a dark, lonely room so that you don't have to put up with other people and so that you don't have to put up with the kosmos at large, but you will never ever be able to run away from yourself. Sometimes things are just horrible. It is a reasonable to be frustrated when machines do not work and/or fail, or when systems do not work and/or fail, or when systems do not work and/or fail. Being frustrated when someone was mean or nasty, when the bus never arrived, when the computer crashed, when someone took the last of the coffee and didn't replace it, when you were standing outside and suddenly it rained down nine kinds of rain, or when your supplier said they'd deliver something on Thursday and they never did, or when your train just stopped and your were an hour late, et cetera et cetera etcera. It is a reasonable response to be frustrated and angry and cranky and sad and disappointed with the kosmos, with other people and with ourselves but that frustration at least indicates that hope still exists. 

Horse 3337 - Fragments XXI: An Abundance Of Rats

JO24 - The Invention Of The Press Release

When building the New York Subway Lines 2 & 3, in order to quell the rumours that twenty people a day were being killed because of workplace danger (the five-cent press found it easy to sell newspapers by embellishing the truth a.k.a "making stuff up", with sensationalist claptrap), the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. hired a chap called I.V. Leadbetter-Lee. 

Leadbetter-Lee who would late go on to do public relations for the Third Reich and the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda (he was that good at his job), worked out that journalists are at heart lazy and/or openly corrupt. He correctly determined that lazy and/or openly corrupt journalists, if you give them copy which has already been written (which means that they do not have to put in the effort of collecting the story, or writing it), will in fact print it word for word most of the time.

Thus in 1916, Ivy Leadbetter-Lee practically invented what we would now call the Press Release.

It should be noted at this point that giving copy to glorified stenographers who like to cosplay as 'journalists' has only gotten worse in the century and a bit which has followed. Public Relations Departments of big corporations have successfully written all kinds of lovely articles which media companies never check. Those same departments of corporations have on occasion also worked in conjunction with Legal Departments of big corporations and have not only written copy but legislation; which when presented to politicians who have very little legal training,  will in fact present the copy that they have been given word for word most of the time, to parliaments.

RA17 - Can You Eat Rats?

Before we go any further, we need to ask "What is Rat?" What is Rat? Rat, is a small rodent of the class Rodentia. Other things that are rodents, are rabbits, mice, capybaras, and other rats. Are these things fine to eat? Sure, why not? Knock yourself out. As rodents are for the most part vegetarians which will also eat garbage, they are nominally fine to eat. In fact, in the city that I live of Sydney, we have a professional Rugby League team which is named after the guy who would come around and sell you rabbits for your dinner. The South Sydney Rabbitohs are not named after the rabbits which are on their logo but the guy (the rabbitoh) who would sell you rabbits. Are these things fine to eat? Sure, why not? Knock yourself out. I have eaten rabbit and guess what? It's fine. Anything that you can do with chicken, or turkey, or duck, or even pork, you can do with rabbit. For that matter, it is probably find to eat mice and capybaras and while we are at it, let's eat pandas as well. Can you eat a rat? Sure, why not? Knock yourself out. I would.

And here's what I do not understand. We live in the twenty-first century where rats are unlikely to be carrying bubonic plague any more. Your average rat in your average city is unlikely to to have anything particularly nasty that can't be cured by curing them and then putting them through a microwave oven process. Rather than waste what is clearly a resource which we have for free, why not make use of it? It is the same kind of rationale why I think that we should be able to get kangaroo meat at the butcher's shop, or rabbit, or whatever is free that isn't going to kill us. Australia (where I live) has a problem with all kinds of feral animals: deer, camels, rabbits, hogs; I think that we can and should eat all of them.

BN09 - Benny's Wawa Order

This week in "Weird Things That I Learnt", I learned that homicidal and genocidal maniac and mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu, spent at least some of his time as a teenager in Philadelphia. MA. I have also learned that Benjamin Netanyahu, spent at least some of his education at Cheltenham High School in Philadelphia. Henceforth, instead of giving this particular knave the deference that he does not deserve, I shall refer to him as Benny From Cheltenham High.

This means that Benny From Cheltenham High, apart from being a future homicidal and genocidal maniac and mass murderer, must have had a Wawa order. As a Jewish kid, one suspects that it might have been kosher but as a rebellious teenager who has subsequently gone on to defy all kinds of laws of decency, I would not be surprised if Benny From Cheltenham High's Wawa Order was a Double Cheeseburger With Bacon because if you're prepared to be a genocidal maniac and mass murderer, then breaking kosher seems like a very low hurdle that you would have jumped over a very lone time ago.

TP02 - Toki Pona Ungood Bugsum

Mrs R and I were watching a video on YouTube about the Constructed Language Toki Pona and how with a total vocabulary of less than 200 words, while it can describe most concepts, it does so with such a degree of vagueness as to be almost useless. It should be apparent very easily that if you limit the scope of what people can say, then their ability to say it is compromised. As an aside, that is the central premise of Newspeak in George Orwell's "1984". By limiting what people can say by means of language, then you even limit what people can think because they lack the language to think it.

One of the things that Toki Pona attempts to do is use only a very small number of words. Mathematicians will tell you that when you only have a very small number of glyphs because the underlying base is small, then the number names get very long very quickly. Take the number 77. In Base-10 that is merely two glyphs. In Base-2, binary, then that same number is written as 1001101. Toki Pona only has word tokens for one and three, and ten. I honestly have no idea what base Toki Pona uses but if it uses base ten, then 77 becomes three-three-one, three-three-one. or perhaps in glyphs 331,331. Already we are using six word tokens to describe a relatively small number.

I happen to be a fan of the dozenal number system, where instead of base-10 it uses base-12. I think that had we all decided upon that then within a few generations, we'd all be happier as 12s can be divided into halves, thirds and quarters, whereas 10s can only be divided into halves and fifths. In base 12, the number 100 divides into, pieces of 60, 40, 30, 20, 16, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, and 1; all nicely. In base-12 our base-10 77 becomes 65, because there are 6 twelves and 5 ones.

On this note (because I like numbers), I think that the old Pounds, Shillings and Pence system of currency was secretly excellent and that owing to inflation and people's demonstrated hatred of doing maths, that we lost something. One shilling was made of 12 pence. Base-12 is already nice because it can be cut into 6, 4, 3, 2, and 1. However, the old Pounds, Shillings and Pence system of currency married this with 20 shillings in the pound. One pound could be cut many many different ways.

One Pound divided by: 

1 is 20/- (which is £1)

2 is 10/-

3 is 6/8

4 is 5/-

5 is 4/-

6 is 3/4

8 is 2/6

10 is 2/-

12 is 1/8

15 is 1/4

16 is 1/3

20 is 1/-

24 is 10d

30 is 8d

40 is 6d

48 is 5d

60 is 4d

120 is 2d

240 is 1d

To a modern audience, an amount of money such as 2/6 (which is two shillings and sixpence) seems daft. To anyone who has ever seen a clock though, the idea that you can cut a circle into twelve pieces, is utterly normal. 6 pence is half a shilling. 2/6 is two and a half shillings; which although intuitively feels like it should be a quarter of something, is actually an eighth of a pound. The number of glyphs required to convey that amount of information is only two, whereas in decimal your need four. One eighth of a Dollar is $0.125. One fifth of that again is 6 pence. 6d. is a lot shorter than $0.025

Owing to the fact that I had an Accounting 1 teacher who was the author of the textbook that we were using, which was 31 years old at the time, I think I might have been possible one of a very small cohort to be the last people in the world to have to use the Pounds, Shillings and Pence system of currency on a regular basis. From an accounting perspective always having amounts divide nicely into discrete pieces  because they are divisible by 12 is excellent. If you multiply quite literally any amount which ends in a penny by twelve (because there are twelve months in the year), they will always always come out to some whole number of shillings with no remainder at all. 2/6 x 12 = £1/10 

It follows that if each glyph can contain a wider scope of information, then you need less of them to convey that same amount of information. Chinese with its compound character system, can contain all kinds of nuanced ideas into a single character; which means that Chinese Language books end up being physically smaller because the information is contained more densely. The flip side to that is that the reader needs to be able to hold all that information in their head as to how to read the glyphs and Chinese with thousands of characters, is an exceptionally hard language to learn to read. It doesn't exactly help that Chinese dialects incluing Mandarin and Cantonese are tonal; which means that you can get close homophones separated only by tone. In that respect, Korean Hangul is a nice glyph set which contains all of the sounds and just like English or any other western language using a Latin character set, very little meaning. C is a nice letter but can be pronounced two ways. Do not even get me started on how you pronounce the letter O (even inside this sentence).

Very clearly the learning curve for Chinese text is big but the reward for doing so is a highly nuanced printed language which is able to convey complex things in a very short space. I have a copy of that great Chinese novel (?) "The Romance Of The Three Kingdoms" in three volumes but in the original Chinese, it can be printed in just a single tome which occupies less than half the volume of one of my three. 

I mention all of this by way of comparison to Toki Pona with its vocabulary of less than 200 words. If it was dealing with maths where the concepts are discrete and the object of the language being conveyed is only discrete provable truth, then it might be a useful language. Language is after all, just a set of vocalised word tokens which convey meaning. If a Pounds, Shillings and Pence system of currency can convey more nuanced and more useful information in smaller units than a Decimal currency system, I really have no idea how Toki Pona is supposed to convey anything other than the most basic information. Anything beyond a list of demands for basic things and Toki Pona from the outside looks to be utterly useless. 

Horse 3336 - If Sunak Was Smart, He Would Call A December Election

 After watching Sadiq Khan retain the position of Mayor of London and watching council after council fall to Labour across England, Rishi Sunak must be looking ahead to the next British General Election with a sense of fear and loathing and dread of impending doom; as well he might. For basically ever since David Cameron promised to send Britain to a referendum on Brexit, the office of Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury has been a poisoned chalice. Only with the help of the very tory trashmedia, have the tories been able to hang on to power for the last decade. It is not because they have been able to demonstrate competent leadership or any ability or desire to do the basic job of governance. If the revolving door at the top (which has seen Cameron, then May, then Johnson, then Truss, then Sunak, all come and go (or look like they will)) is demonstrative of the trouble below, then the Conservative Party and the Unionists if they still exist, are facing political oblivion. To which I say "Good. If you vote tory, you are not peoples' friend."

The question then is not if the tories will lose government but by how much. There are suggestions in the right-wing tory trashmedia that there will be a hung parliament but this appears to be a wish list in the face of their worst case scenario. This election as far as Labour is concerned, is their equivalent to the 1983 Australian General Election which "a drover's dog could win"; and then did. If the polls are correct, then Labour will canter into 326, maybe walk as far as 400, and depending on how much the tory durian has rotted by then maybe 500 seats is a possibility. As it is, we already have rats jumping from the sinking ship; which is also on fire as it is preparing to sink beneath the waves.

If you saw all of this and knew that it was coming, what would you do? I personally think that the best option would be to quietly admit defeat now, make a half-hearted election campaign, lose, and then collect the parliamentary pension which would be due because you lost the seat rather than quitting. Or else you could do some very visible and ultimately meaningless but very public gesture, like promising to put up a statue for all of the horses killed in World War I, then hope to get an ermine parachute into the House of Lords like Lord David Cameron, the Lord of Much Dribbling and Pork Scratchings did. If however, Sunak does actually want to fire one last dog bomb of fabulousness into parliament before he leaves, then the best option is to call the election for the 12th of December. Why the 12th of December? The answer may surprise you.

As the United Kingdom still hasn't properly worked out how to to democracy, despite and in spite of the fact that other countries like Australia modified the Westminster system to be a million billion godzillion times better, with compulsory voting, voting on a Saturday, paper ballots, voting for the upper house, preferential voting, proportional representation et cetera et cetera et cetera, then it still retains a full-bore thick as mince voting system which was perfectly adequate for the 1680s but not for 340 years later. Calling a General Election for the 12th of December would make excellent use of the fact that the British voting system is so incredibly rubbish, that democracy can be gained merely by setting the date.

The United Kingdom has voluntary voting. This means that the United Kingdom makes practically no effort at all to obtain the consent of the governed when selecting who will be a Member of Parliament. The parties dictate who appears on the ballot paper and then the electorate shows up once every five years to put a cross in a box to decide whether or not they want to eat from a selection of three kinds of manure, or two kinds of animal vomit. Because the United Kingdom has voluntary voting, then it is really easy to dissuade people from showing up at the polling station, just by making use of the date.

The 12th of December, is already after the point where it has turned cold in Britain. If you wanted to launch a nuclear attack and kill as many people as possible, then doing so after the 1st of December, would mean that people would die of cold and exposure within their own homes. This is key. By deciding on the 12th of December as the date for holding an election, then only the most motivated people will come out to vote. Nobody really wants to stand out in the cold and possibly the rain and sleet and snow, just to put a cross in a box, when the idea of staying at home in the warmth with a cup of tea and Emmmerdale on t'telly seems like a good idea. Would you rather go out to vote, or watch The One Show?

Using the weather itself to suppress the vote, on the surface sounds like a dastardly thing to do. However, when you have a proven track record of cutting funding from health care services, from housing services, and actively doing nothing when people literally die in a building fire, then suppressing the vote through the use of the weather starts to look almost saintly. 

Also, as the 12th of December is a Thursday, then the people who actually do real work for a living, as opposed to the people who are more likely to be older, and richer, and more interested in voting, are less likely to venture out to polling stations. Voluntary Voting is often defended on the basis of free choice but often the people who need to have their voice heard the most, are simply less likely to exercise that voice when the barrier to entry to vote, might actually be whether or not someone is able to pay the rent that week.

Here's the really fun thing about so-called First-Past-The-Post voting. It really isn't. It merely is Most Votes Wins voting. Most Votes Wins by making sure that your enemies do not vote, still achieves the same outcome. The ballot box cares not an iota, not a jot, about how the numbers got there. Also, as parliaments are swung by the number of votes upon the floor of the House Of Commons, then it really doesn't actually matter about the seats which will never vote for you, nor the seats which will always vote for you. The only thing that matters from a games perspective, is how many seats flip one way or the other in the flippable middle. If you are the Conservative Party, then you do not want Labour voters to turn out to vote.

12th of December is also just sufficiently late enough that the electorate will not think that you are intruding on Christmas. An election on the 19th would be electoral suicide but the 12th falls just outside that lovely window of 10 days, by which time they will have forgotten about the problem. You may even get a slight boost in the tory turn-out if people think that they will get the rest of the day off to do Christmas shopping. 

I still think that Sunak is staring into the abyss and should expect to see nothing but just a tiny about of applied game theory might mean that at the end of the year there's a golden sky, and the sweet silver song of the lark. If you are Rishi Sunak, you will probably lose government and your seat and then retire to a lovely seven consulting figure job in The City; having made ample use of the friendships that you gained by torying your way through parliament for the last while. Why else would you become an MP if your are already independently very very wealthy, if not to change the rules for your tory mates and hope that they'll give you a kickback after the electorate has called time on you.

Horse 3335 - A Place Kick In Australian Rules Football?

Anyone will tell you that Australia is "a prison island hidden in the summer for a million years", or so said the band Icehouse. Being in isolation which amounts to a kind of solitary confinement, all of the animals, all of the plants, and even all the people both indigenous and imported over the past 236 years, have all gone quite a bit mad. It follows that the very particular kind of football invented and developed in Australia, roughly sort of kind of almost inspired by Marn Grook, which is so old that it predates Association Football by 2 years, which is so old that it  predates Rugby by 12 years, and which is so old that it predates American Football by 61 years, is also quite a bit mad. It is quite fitting that we have a mad mad kind of football played on a mad mad island continent.

To describe Australian Rules Football to someone who has never seen it before, it is like a weird version of kick-to-kick, with 18 players per side, on a cricket oval, with no such thing as offside because that would be impossible for one referee to police. On top of this, you are only allowed to punch the ball around or kick it. There is no throwing the ball. It is as if someone with only a vague idea of what they wanted football to be, kind of made up all the rules as they went along until everyone agreed that it was about right. As this particular mad mad kind of football didn't need to take instruction from anyone else in the world, that's not too far from the truth.

As I said previously. you are only allowed to punch the ball around or kick it. Punching the ball, also known as a handpass, is pretty obvious; so it more or less solidified immediately. Kicking the ball is another matter, as there are in fact a number of subtly different ways to kick a football. When it comes to kicking the ball, the most efficient way of doing that which has been refined over the last 50 years or so, is the drop punt. A drop punt will not go as far as a torpedo kick, not will it swing through the air like a banana kick, nor is it as powerfully sharp as a normal punt but for most distances, it is the most accurate; to the point where just about all other kinds of kicks have been made obsolete.

One such kind of kick which used to exist and now does not, is the place kick. The advantages of a place kick are that as the ball does not move, it is far easier to get right. The obvious disadvantage of a place kick is that it is really really hard to get massive amounts of distance on and since the game generally got more spread out as people worked out how to kick the ball further and further, the necessary skill to do a proper place kick withered and faded out completely.

As someone who was born in the late 1970s and after the advent of colour television, the idea that there even was a place kick in Australian Rules Football seems totally buckwild to me. I can honestly say that I have never ever seen a place kick in any game of Aussie Rules ever; and the idea of doing one just seems pointless to me. As an Australian Australian who has played Australian Rules football, I like any decent Australian Australian can kick a Sherrin 50 meters with relative ease. Admittedly I can not kick it as accurately as a professional football player, but I am sure that had I spent my working life kicking a football as my stock and trade of making a livelihood, then I would be far better at it. Nevertheless, even as a relatively poor player of Australian Rules football, I am sure to within a mil of 100 percent, that I could drop punt a football further than anyone ever could place pick an ovaloid football.

Australian Rules Football really came into its own in 1970 when the GTV-9 in Melbourne was finally able to broadcast the 1970 VFL Final to Adelaide, Hobart, Sydney and Brisbane. What makes this game particularly interesting is that apart from being the first proper game to be broadcast in full on telly. is that the place kick, is already entirely gone from the game. There are people attempting torpedo kicks and stabby sharp punts, but nobody attempts a place kick after they have taken a mark. In fact, so strange is the idea to a modern watcher of the game, that neither my dad nor my boss, who both grew up in the era before television, even knew that a place kick was even an option. I would like to say in these cases, that collective memory of what Australian Rules football looks like, is very much shaped by the invention of the live television broadcast. 

This means that if you want to see a place kick attempted in an Australian Rules football game, you need to look further and further back into what little archival film exists. One of the problems with this is that Australian Rules football is played on a vast unwieldy cricket oval; which means that the whole visual language of how to film a match properly, is not yet known. 

I have found but one still photograph of a place kick attempted in an Australian Rules football game; which as best as I can determine is in a match between Richmond and Carlton at Punt Road in 1929. The ground is positively teeming with life. There is standing room only and as this is almost certainly Punt Road Oval, the teeming masses will have arrived via both tram and train, as opposed to getting to Prince's Park which would have been more difficult to get to. Carlton are playing in deep navy blue, and Richmond are playing in a yellow kit with a black sash which is the reverse of their usual black kit with a yellow sash. I have no idea which match it is. I have no idea who is taking the kick. I do have some idea of what the score is because if you look over yonder, I think that the score is 5.4.34. I do not know who is on 34 points though. 

The fact that you have an Australian Rules football player attempting a place kick, with an ovaloid ball, is itself mind warping. With a round ball, you can at least make use of curl and dip if you want it to be sent goal bound. However, with an ovaloid ball the amount of curl that you would get is horrifying. As it is, players make use of the fact that a drop punt can get the ball to loop end over end and this improves accuracy but with a place kick, I honestly have no idea how you'd properly control all of those end points, which can and do act as flight surfaces. 

Just an elementary understanding of basic flight characteristics of a ball would lead me to guess very quickly that trying a place kick is a losing strategy. You would only need to attempt this a few times to realise that this is monumentally silly. This only adds to my near complete bafflement at this photo. I can only assume that as this player is near the centre of the ground, that this place kick's only purpose is to try to kick the laces off the ball and give it such a massive thump, that direction is irrelevant. If all you are trying to do is send the ball upfield and have no regard for where it goes, then this might be semi-sensible.

Even in that respect, the drop punt as the most accurate of all the kicks, is a far better idea as the kicker can use their eyes to find loose players and their mouths to bark out words of Saxon encouragement and four-letter abuse to create movement off the ball. A place kick, which is going to be less accurate and is going to develop all kinds of funky flight attitude, is more of a lottery for possession at the other end. 

I say all of this in full knowledge of the fact that place kick is used all the time in both Rugby Union, Rugby League, and American Football. The two kinds of rugby are inclined to let the kicker use a kicking tee, whereas American Football has another player set up their ball for the kicker to kick. I do not think that there would be kicking tees in an Australian Rules football game, given the sheer number of kicks in any given match. A place kick is a hideously slow process in comparison to a series of drop punts, which can happen in sequence when a team is trying to move a ball up the field. In neither form of rugby would a team even attempt a shot at goal beyond 50 meters and in American Football a field goal attempt from beyond 50 years is a rarity. Kicking 50 meters in an Australian Rules football game is the bread and butter of every single player on the park from Full Back to Full Forward and all positions in between.

Kicking 50 meters in an Australian Rules football game with a place kick is likely impossible and that's why it fell out of favour. Still, the fact that it existed, although real, is weird.

Horse 3334 - Kakosynaisthima - Element V - Longing

Even deeper than the idea that the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos can reasonably easily make value judgements between what is "yummy, yummy, yummy" and what is "not yummy", is the notion that the idea that the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos actually needs things. The fact that there are things which are "yummy" and "not yummy" does not exist in a void but springs forth from the fact that humans are living and breathing creatures who would like to go on living and breathing most of the time. On top of this, the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos which makes value judgements, and processes needs and wants based upon "yummy, yummy, yummy" and what is "not yummy" and fashions them into more than just needs but into wants, preferences, desires, likes, dislikes, disgusts, revulsions et cetera et cetera et cetera.

Psychologists like Abraham Mazlow have tried to enquire into what people need at an atomic level and at their most elemental, those needs are found to be not broadly wider than air, food, shelter, clothing, protection and to love and be loved. Who would have guessed that relatively small living beings need the things which keep them alive and not dead. Seeing as we have come to the highest end of this, we can say that the job here is done.

Or is it?

The kosmos is notoriously awful at satisfying needs and wants and at matching resources to the fulfillment of those needs and wants. There are some mechanisms such as the abstract idea of the market which matches volumes and prices, or justice which matches torts and injuries to consequence, or karma which purports to match moral goodness or badness to some kind of wages and rewards; but we all know that the market fails, that justice fails, and that karma never really worked in the first place.

The difference between what people need and/or want and what the kosmos will assign them, boils down to a crude equation: Needs and Wants minus Allotment equals a Gap. Nature generally abhors a vacuum; so instead of leaving an individual with the gap, it leaves us all with a sense of Longing about the things that we do not have. In principle it is not bad to need things because the alternative to staying alive is not to be alive any more and the mere thought of that can be terrifying. In principle it is also not bad to want things because wanting things is the result of the beast making value judgements et cetera, to chase the "yummy, yummy, yummy". It is when that wanting is excessive and harms others and yourself that it is a problem.

As limited beings who live inside electro-mechanical meatbags, with some kind of unknowable operating system of soul/spirit/zoe (your conception of the kosmos will vary), and who operate in both limited space and linear time, we have expectations about how the kosmos operates. It is good to have expectations about how the kosmos operates because whether we like it or not, we had no choice about entering it and we need some set of base expectations in order to live inside of it. Those expectations come with all kinds of attachments in relation to how narrative should unfold. Part of the reason why stories work is that they unfold in the direction of narrative and match up with the way that our expectations about how the kosmos operates suggests that they should. We also live inside the narrative of our own lives; and of course with continuous reinforcement and observation of how other people live their lives, our expectations  are in turn shaped by those same inputs.

There is an entire question surrounding the whole notion of desire and the relative value and morality of wants. Some people have answered the question with the broad answer that because the human heart is selfish and evil, then everything it wants must also therefore be selfish and evil. While that sounds like it might be true, it fails upon testing when you consider that some of our wants spring forth from our needs. Is it evil to want to love and be loved? Is it evil to want to express the various forms of civic philos and be part of a broader community and commonwealth, or to want to express eros and be part of a very intimate partnership, or to want to express storge and be of service and helpful to others? Granted, the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos can reasonably made out to be nothing more than a brute but even the beast has needs and wants to know and be known and to validate and be validated. Indeed you have to take a very very cynical view of the world to reduce literally everything down to transactional elements based upon selfishness but even then when you do scrub everything down that very Randian view of the world, even the notion of evil itself disappears.

As we do live in a kosmos in which other electro-mechanical meatbags live lives which are broadly similar, the expectations which we form tend to trend towards some kind of central normality. If it is reasonable for other people to have a thing, then why isn't it reasonable for me to enjoy something similar. If 95% of all things lie within 2 standard deviations of some central normality, then the fact that we do not or can not enjoy a thing, means that we must be an abnormal edge case. Yes it is true that every single person is an individual but at the same time we all develop some innate sense that outliers from a central normality give rise to the possibility of some kind of defectiveness. As with loneliness which implies some state of defectiveness which people need to stay away from, an unfulfilled needs or want within ourselves, might imply some kind of defectiveness within ourselves. A sense of longing can be a kind of warning lamp that something inside ourselves needs to be corrected. The problem as with so many elements of Kakosynaisthima is that it can not be shared with anyone else, except as some broad collective project.

Here is both a paradox and a problem, everyone at some time does develop at least some sense of longing for things that are not, will be not, and/or must not be. If everyone does develop a sense of longing at some time, then it can not definitionally be an edge case which lies beyond two standard deviations of some central normality. Longing is very much a part of the central normality of being human, yet due to the fact that we are simply unable to share so very much about our experience with anyone else, that sense of defectiveness from cosmic loneliness is real.

It is quite true the idea that the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos is selfish but having both needs and wants which stem from more than purely selfish roots, means that a sense of Longing can't always be implicitly or actually evil. The wish that will never be fulfilled, or the desire which will never be satisfied, or the goal which through circumstances of time and space, all of which will never be achieved: can and do create a real sense of longing. Mere gluttony and avarice stem from the unchained beast's desire for more and more to an unreasonable degree, but a wish for something which is reasonable and still will never be met, is a different thing entirely.

Gluttony and greed extend from the fact that selfish people have an unlimited capacity to produce wants and then will sometimes for to unreasonable lengths to achieve the fulfilment of those wants. Longing in contrast, usually has to do more with wants that are not fulfilled at all and when those wants are fulfilled, the sense of longing disappears entirely. In some respects if gluttony and greed are the racking up of expenses within the human soul, then longing is like the issuance of some currency which is looking to retire a debt and square the ledger; and when it does so both the debt and the longing disappear.

Perhaps there is something to be said about the beast which shouts "I" at the heart wanting more and more and more, to the point of greed, gluttony and avarice. However, that beast can certainly be chained through the art of training, of will, and of practicing temperance (kind of). The idea that the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos has needs that can not or will not be met, or wants that can not or will not be met, must invariably cause a degree of anxiety and worry. A need that is not met, or a want that will never be fulfilled, especially if that need or want is reasonable, is a just cause for sadness.

On the other hand, what kind of comfort is there to someone going through a a sense of Longing about things that might or might not be. What do you say to the person who will never have a child? There may be circumstances which prevent it from happening, such as physical ability, or simply because life and destiny did not take them there. What about the person who never finds a significant other, through seemingly no fault of their own. What about the person who wanted to go to university, or wanted to go overseas, or simply wanted a place that they could call home? What about those people who had something which has been torn away from them by circumstance, disaster or war? What they want is a world that been and gone, and must not be again. Again we return to the fact that the kosmos does not have a very good distribution system, and it is often the actions of very very evil people which changes the fortunes of a great deal many other people for the worse.

Longing might very well drive someone to change their circumstances because of the flames which burn inside the human heart. If one hopes to change the kosmos such that the sense of longing a thing can be fulfilled, then that is mission accomplished. If one is angry that the kosmos is faulty and bad at satisfying those needs and wants, then that will also drive someone to take action. Of course, those flames can very much be extinguished because even electro-mechanical meatbags with some kind of unknowable operating system of soul/spirit/zoe must realise that there are things that will not or must not be. Then what? 

Strip away longing to see what lies underneath and what we find is a sense of hope, which has been hurt. People develop a sense of longing over what once was or what might be because they have needs and wants which they hope will be fulfilled. The refugee who has escaped awful circumstances has a sense of longing that they will be able to find a better life for both them and their children. The person who lives in a country which has been snapped in half due to war, or some kind of cultural separation, has a sense of longing that they will once again live in a country which is repaired. The person who is currently estranged from their family or friends due to some argument, conflict, dispute, distance, et cetera has a sense of longing that they will be able to reconcile the relationship. Some who is desperately single and lonely has a sense of longing that they will be able to share their life with someone with who they can love and be loved and validate and be validated. All of these are underpinned by a sense of hope that the kosmos can and should change in a way that they would like it to. Again, we return to the awful truth that the kosmos is bad at satisfying needs and wants.

If there is anything to be gained from having a sense of longing it is the reminder that hope still exists. However badly people have been hurt and however much the kosmos has failed to meet people's needs and wants, as the future remains unwritten, there is still possibility in the unknown. It could very well be possible that the kosmos might apportion something and those needs and wants will be fulfilled; in which case a sense of patience is in order. It could very well be possible that the kosmos might never apportion something and those needs and wants will always remain unfulfilled; in which case a sense of gratitude for the things that we already have is in order. 

"Follow your dreams, unless your dream is stupid; then you need to get a better dream."

- Journey.

The actual telos of longing could very well be that final push for people who are still waiting for a world that been and gone and must not be again, that the winds of change have blown and blown again, and that what they were hoping for is impossible. It could very well be that a sense of longing is the kosmos' way of trying to display 403 Forbidden or 404 File Not Found messages and it matters not a jot, because you simply will not get the thing you were hoping for. Remember, the other side of a market which is about satisfying needs and wants and at matching resources to the fulfillment of those needs and wants, is that sometimes the market will either refuse to line these things up due to market failure, or refuse to line these things up because the volumes and costs of doing so can never be reconciled. It hates to admit it but the most offensive thing to the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos, is being told "No."

Horse 3333 - The 246 Bus. Rated *****

*

There is a bus route which is a bit out of the way from near where I work, which has a dedicated bus stop; which almost seems like case of overkill as it only has two scheduled services per day. The 246 bus which is labelled "Balmoral Heights" has one service which leaves this stop at 1746 and then 40 minutes later at 1826.

How come I had never seen or heard of this bus? The first and most obvious reason is that it leaves well after I have already left the office but even so, I am well aware of many buses that I will never catch. I will confess that this is the sort of thing which belongs in a Dull Men's Club and the kind of thing which Gunzels' cousins Bunzels get really excited about. To be honest, I care a bit about buses because as a public transport user in a city which has always been behind the times in making improvements right across every model network, needing to know what is and is not available is useful if I want to get home when the system can and does break.

**

After I found this, I decided to do some investigating and what I found got really strange really quickly. The first really weird thing that I found was that the 246 bus is conspicuous by its abscence. I have subsequently found the 246 bus listed on exactly zero other bus stop signs around the suburb and believe me, I have been looking; even along the suggested route by the Transport Info website:

https://transportnsw.info/documents/timetables/29-246-Balmoral-Heights-to-City-Wynyard-20240130.pdf

The 246 bus is listed as having a route from Balmoral Heights to the City but all links for the bus route from the City to Balmoral Heights are broken. Immediately we run into the same enigma at the other end that we have at this end. Not only is the 246 bus conspicuous by its absence at this end of the route but it is also conspicuous by its absence at the other end where there supposedly exists a return journey. Again, there are exactly zero other bus stop signs which list the 246 bus' existence, including from the bus stops where it allegedly departs from in the City to come back to Balmoral Heights.

*** 

After discovering that the 246 bus allegedly runs from Balmoral Heights to the City and back again, we have to immediately address a new enigma. The question of "What is City?" is relatively easy to answer as this comes from a pricing zone which has to do with Sydney Trains. "City" includes Redfern, Central/Sydney Terminal, Town Hall, Wynyard, Circular Quay, St. James, and Museum, and all of the intermodal connecting services which attach to those stations therein. In the days when Return tickets were a thing, it was allowable to take a train, bus, ferry, or tram, to any of those stations and then make the Return journey from any of the other stations. "City" is like the blob. "What is Balmoral Heights?" is a harder thing to explain. 

Balmoral Heights is not a suburb but rather, a locality. The Insanic Republic of Mosman is a one suburb local council. Places like Balmoral Heights, The Spit, Clifton Gardens, Balmoral Beach, et cetera, exist only in the minds of the people as vague ideas and have no legal standing. I make mention of this because unlike other buses which describe Spit Junction, or QVB as a destination, which are very obvious fixed places, Balmoral Heights as a vague idea which has no legal standing, is purely that. Listing a bus that has Balmoral Heights as a destination on the headboard, is like saying that "Yeah, Er, Yah, Kinda, Sorta, Dunno", is a a destination. 

****

If you delve deeper into what is increasingly looking like Bunzel goblin magic, you find that there are such things known as Statutory Bus Routes. Under the regulations, sub-regulations, sub-sub-regulations, sub-sub-sub-regulations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, we learn that the NSW State Government Transport Authority (whatever they call themselves this week), is required to gazette various bus lines. There are some minimum consequences of a gazetted bus route, including that it must be sign posted. The thing is, I could not find anything in the morass of regulations and sub-regulations that actually required a bus operator to do its basic telos and operate a bus. Again, as I have never actually observed the 246 bus, there is a distinct possibility that it might not actually run any services whatsoever.

*****

Peering further in to the regulations and sub-regulation Bunzel goblin magic, you find that the operator of the 246 bus (if in fact they do actually operate the bus route on behalf of the NSW State Government) should be Keolis Downer. Now I have already established a pretty dim view of these knavish eejits because they have successfully degraded the 100 bus from a 10 minute service to maybe a 20 minute service, and the B1 bus from a 7 minute service to maybe a 15 minute service, or effectively less if you happen to be standing at Spit Junction bus stop and those big yellow B1 buses become Schrodinger's Buses with "Sorry Bus Full" displayed on their headboard.

Here's where fun really happens. Apart from this single, solitary, lonely sign, in the middle of a transport desert island where nobody is ever likely to check, the 246 bus allegedly runs two services from a place that is only an idea to a vague place which exists as a pricing zone and run by a private operator who could very easily cancel a service which might not even be necessarily legally operated to run. I assume that the 246 bus is in fact a gazetted Statutory Bus Route because this sign exists but the deliciously hilarious thing is that because this single, solitary, lonely sign, in the middle of a transport desert island where nobody is ever likely to check, then who would ever know if Keolis Downer never actually operate any buses on this route? If they chose not to because it was unprofitable to do so, but liked the idea of collecting revenue because of the idea of a Statutory Bus Route, then who is actually going to check up on them?

Remember, allegedly there are two services at 1746 and then 40 minutes later at 1826 but unless the NSW State Government sends someone out to verify that they exist, do they really?

***** Those aren't stars they're asterisks each one referring to a fault in logic.